Crossfire (The Clifford-Mackenzie Crime Series Book 1)

by R. D. Nixon

  ‘I still don’t—’

  ‘But when Wallace died, all bets were off. His protection of Cameron was over. Bradley told me about you, Dad. Told me what I’d have to do to protect you now.’

  ‘Protect me?’

  ‘Don’t come the innocent! I know!’

  Tony was mystified, and growing worried again. ‘Just what is it that you think you know?’

  ‘Bradley told me how you were part of the robbery at the Spence estate. That you were the one I’d been protecting Cameron against! And that now Wallace was gone Cameron was scared stiff, and planned to shop you.’ He said the only way to protect you was to get rid of him.’ Nick’s voice thickened, and he lowered his head. ‘I didn’t want to, Dad. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but if you’d gone to prison, as a copper—’

  ‘Stop!’ Tony stood up, his heart racing. ‘I was never involved in that robbery. We were living in Glasgow back then, for crying out loud!’

  ‘It’s only a four-hour drive,’ Nick pointed out. ‘And you knew people here, even back then.’

  ‘Aye, well I never knew Duncan Wallace, or any of his cronies! And I certainly never threatened Dougie Cameron. Are you seriously telling me you believed that oily bastard?’

  ‘Of course I did!’ Nick pulled the towel closer around himself. ‘I thought I was saving your life.’

  ‘How could you have thought that of me?’

  ‘Dad, I was twenty!’

  Tony pulled his trembling son to him. He’d been a child. He must have been so torn… He felt his own tears burn. ‘You’ve gone all this time thinking I was a thief? And corrupt?’

  ‘You were still my dad. The fact that you were so straight... It made sense, that you were covering something up.’

  ‘And you never mentioned it to your mum or Maddy?’

  ‘How could I?’

  ‘And now?’

  Nick slumped, looking wretched. ‘Now I believe you. Of course I do. I always think clearer after…’ He gestured to his leg. ‘But Bradley said you’d go down for the original crime as well as perverting the course of justice… Your life wouldn’t have been worth that!’ He snapped his fingers, and Tony flinched.

  ‘So you killed an innocent man.’ He spoke slowly, trying to get the words to make sense.

  ‘I didn’t think he was innocent, not at the time.’ Nick dragged his bloodied hands through his hair. ‘I just thought it was one unholy mess, and your life was at risk from what Dougie could do to you. It was a straight choice, and not a hard one.’

  ‘How… How did you manage it?’

  There was a long silence, and Tony felt sicker and sicker as he waited. Finally Nick spoke, and he sounded almost robotic. ‘First I tried to run him down. A hit and run, you know? He always had music on when he walked into town. But he heard me anyway and jumped into the ditch. So I had to go all the way to the studio.’

  He sat up and moved along the sofa. Away from Tony, as if he were trying to disassociate himself. ‘Ben had told me about the gun his dad kept on the shelf, and I was going to use it, but Mr Cameron got hold of a chisel and tried to do me with it, so I used that instead.’ He rubbed his chest, as if a remembered pain had become a real one. Or he wished it had. He had managed to get his emotions under control now, and although his face still twisted with self-loathing and guilt, his words made all too perfect sense.

  ‘Bradley was lying about where he was, you’re right. But only because he was off shagging Sarah Wallace. I was supposed to be down south with Ben at a festival, but I cried off. I knew I was going to do it that weekend. I planned it. Thought about it all the time, until it was something I couldn’t go back on.’

  ‘Have you been self-harming ever since?’

  ‘Not quite.’ Nick lifted the blood-soaked towel and studied his leg dispassionately. ‘I was scared, and that felt right. It was exactly what I deserved. Then, when the investigation was closed and I realised I wasn’t going to be punished, that’s when I started.’

  ‘Cutting yourself.’

  ‘Eventually. Not at the start. I used to pinch and that was enough, but not for long.’ He met Tony’s gaze. ‘You are going to turn me in, aren’t you? I mean, you have to, now I know you really are the straight-down-the-line one. The one with integrity.’

  Tony felt helplessness creeping through him, turning his long-held principles into questions: what purpose would it serve? Who would benefit from it? Was there still a way to convict Bradley of it after all?

  He took a deep breath. ‘What you were scared would happen to me, if I got sent down… Nick, that’ll be you. You’ll be a target from the moment you’re arrested. Before you’re convicted, even. I can’t put you through that.’

  ‘You’d do it to Bradley; you have to do it to me. You’ll hate yourself, and me, if you don’t.’

  ‘I’d be killing you,’ Tony said bleakly. He rubbed his hands over his face.

  ‘If the alternative is to go on being a prisoner inside my own head,’ Nick gave Tony the saddest smile, ‘you’d be doing me a favour.’

  The words went through Tony like a shard of ice, and he found a few words, somehow, to get them past this moment of mutual devastation. ‘Let’s just wait, and talk tomorrow when we’re clear-headed.’

  He sat in silence, his mind turning over and over, finally understanding Nick’s guilt and why he sought such extreme measures to mute it; the conflict was like a pain in his heart. Could he condemn a police officer to a life of terror in prison? Could he really destroy his own life, a life built on honesty and honour, to save a guilty man? He looked sideways at Nick; head bowed, blood drenched, his knuckles white, and he closed his eyes.

  Integrity be damned, this was his son.

  Maddy watched as different emotions crossed her father’s face with bewildering speed. She’d expected some kind of grim satisfaction when he learned of the manner of Bradley’s death, as far as she understood it, but as she told him everything, in a quiet corridor just down from Paul’s room, he only looked cheated, angry, and then determined.

  ‘He’ll still get what’s coming to him.’

  ‘I hope so. I’ve not found out what they think, yet. Nick will be the one to learn the details, I expect.’

  His expression changed again, becoming distant. ‘Come outside for a bit,’ he said, after a moment. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  As he put out his hand to take hers, she noticed something dark red crusting his cuticles and flaking at the edges of his nails, and she snatched her hand back. He blinked in surprise before following her gaze, and then shook his head. ‘It’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Is Ben Cameron okay?’ she asked sharply, and he looked even more taken aback by that.

  ‘Ben? I have no idea, why?’

  ‘Whose blood is that?’

  ‘It’s Nick’s. He’s fine,’ he went on quickly, ‘just a little accident at home. Why are you asking about Cameron?’

  She relaxed slightly. ‘Doesn’t matter. Look, what do you want to talk about? I want to stay with Paul, and there’s Charis to—’

  ‘It’s important, hen. Please.’

  She went with him, her distracted mind shifting back to Charis, and hoping Gavin wouldn’t keep her waiting too long. He’d get her out today, for sure, and reunited with Jamie, but it was going to be tough to convince the police that she hadn’t killed Sarah Wallace. Maddy herself was going to have to confess to having shot the woman through the window, and would likely be sent down for attempted murder; only the fact that she was acting to preserve a child’s life might save her, though that was no guarantee either.

  But even those dark thoughts were blown away when, in the privacy of a deserted bus shelter, her father told her about Nick, and Dougie Cameron. A chill crept through her at the knowledge of what her brother had done, and, almost worse, that he’d been able to keep it hidden from them for all these years... Even feeling the way she had, after shooting Sarah, she couldn’t begin to imagine how it must have felt to ki
ll a man face-to-face. An innocent, terrified man, and with a weapon driven by his own hand.

  She took a few deep breaths to steady the shakes that seized her, feeling the cool morning air on her suddenly sweating brow, and sat down on the metal seat. After a while she looked at her father, and then down at his hand.

  ‘Does this have anything to do with that?’ She nodded at the blood. ‘Did something else happen?’

  For a moment he was silent, and then seemed to make his decision. Haltingly, he told her the rest of Nick’s story. A vivid flash of memory showed her the way her brother had tugged at his jeans leg to cover the blood on his sock when he’d been playing with Tas, and how she’d teased him about cutting himself shaving. Picked a scab if you must know… She felt both ill and desperately sad. How many other excuses had he had to scrabble for, to which she just hadn’t paid any attention?

  ‘What will you do?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Nothing.’ Her father met her eyes with his deeply shadowed ones. ‘We’re going to have to help Nick through this, because no matter what he thinks, he’s not going to be eased by going to jail. Not by my hand, and not, I trust, by yours.’

  ‘No,’ she said quietly, though still not entirely sure. ‘Not by mine either.’

  ‘Nor Mackenzie’s?’

  ‘No. Nor his own, if I’ve got a say in it.’

  ‘Good.’ He let out a shuddering breath, and Maddy put her arm around him, decision made.

  ‘We’ll protect him as best we can.’ She drew back. ‘But Alistair Mulholland is still out there, and he’s the real threat, especially if he knows what Nick did. The trouble is, we need his gun, to prove neither Charis nor myself killed Sarah Wallace.’

  Tony looked at her steadily. ‘I’ve crossed a line now. I’ve chosen to protect a guilty man, which means I’m no longer the man I was.’ His eyes took on a disturbingly dangerous glint. ‘Any man who’s a threat to my family is fair game.’

  Maddy stiffened. ‘You can’t—’

  ‘Ah, don’t mind me.’ Tony smiled, but it was brittle. ‘Just bravado, that’s all. Heat of the moment stuff, you know.’

  He kissed Maddy lightly on the forehead, and the smile gradually relaxed into his old gentle one. But Maddy glanced sideways at him as he walked by her side, back into the hospital, and wondered about her close-knit, loving family, and whether she’d ever really known them at all.

  Acknowledgments

  First thanks must go to my wonderful parents, Anne and Eddie Deegan, for moving to Scotland in 1991, and introducing me to its matchless beauty and drama. They started something then, for sure!

  I’m grateful to every single one of my friends and readers who have encouraged me to take this, the first novel I ever wrote (in the early 1990s), and give it a new lease of life in the 2020s; your confidence in me is gratifying, and I hope it’s been repaid. Likewise, I would like to thank Rebecca and Adrian at Hobeck, for picking up this story and giving it its chance out in the world.

  Finally my thanks to everyone in the huge and supportive writing community, on Facebook and Twitter as well as in ‘real’ life. Special thanks to Glynis Smy, Deborah Carr, and Christie Barlow, and to everyone in the TSAG. And a big shout-out to the Savvies: the best writers’ group on the planet!

  About the Author

  R.D. Nixon is a pen-name of author Terri Nixon, who has been publishing historical drama and mythic fantasy novels since 2013. The initials belong to her two sons, who are graciously pretending not to mind.

  Terri was born in Plymouth, UK. She moved to Cornwall at the age of nine, and grew up on the edge of Bodmin Moor, where her early writing found its audience in her school friends, who, to be fair, had very little choice. She has now returned to Plymouth, and works in the university’s Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business. She is occasionally mistaken for a lecturer, but not for long.

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